PLEASE NOTE: This book contains graphic description ... - HUNSOR

and their supporters. On one occasion, after a long investigation, the gendarmerie collected abouttwenty people, including the Orthodox priest, whose son had escaped, after arousing somesuspicion. The Serb suspects were sentenced to death by the summary court.The Roman Catholic Priest, Balint Dupp, appeared before the court and the firing squad sayingthat they should not punish the father for his son's behavior, wich would be a fatal personal andpolitical mistake. "If you execute him, let me be executed too, for there has been friendshipbetween us so far, and the survival of Hungarian Catholics is at stake..."The priest's act caused several hours of confusion within the military justice. There weresupporting telephone calls. The Catholic congregation flocked around their priest, and they hadthe support of the Orthodox population, but it was all in vain. While Dupp was away at thecounty court in Zsablya for further negotiations and ironed out an agreement with Gyula Hazai,the High Sheriff all twenty convicts were executed in Csurog. It is said that a possible prelude tothe Orthodox priest's execution, and a cause of the later vendetta, was the fact that on theHungarian troops' arrival in 1941, the daughter of the same priest went to the commandingofficer, and while greeting him in Hungarian fired at him with a pistol hidden in her bunch offlowers. The brave and fanatical girl was immediately shot dead by the surrounding soldiers.In mid-October, 1944, when the partisans and the vengeful villagers started butcheringHungarians, the Orthodox Serbs defended the Catholic priest from arrest and death,remembering his behavior two years before. In the second week of the slaughter, the son of theexecuted Orthodox priest turned up in Csurog as a Major of the partisans. At once he demandedthe Catholic priest's arrest.He convened the Village Committee for the Liberation of the People, and demanded that thepriest should be executed as "an eye for an eye". The more decent Serbs defended Dupp almostday and night for two days, saying that he had been the one to fight for their priest two yearsbefore. The Major then grew tired of bargaining and the apparently invincible resistance of thelocals, with some military help from Novi Sad, captured the priest and had him taken to theregional center. There, due to his connections, he arranged that the priest was declared a warcriminal and carried109back to Csurog with a death sentence. There the major's partisans executed Balint Dupp in frontof his church, without even blindfolding him.It was not his congregation who maintained the memory of Balint Dupp's lamentable death, butsome better natured old Orthodox men who were ashamed of the deeds of the Serbian villagers.The partisan commander could not gather any Catholics to watch the sight, since those who wereleft alive were walking now with scarcely any clothes on to the concentration camp in Jarek tolie starving on the bloody straw swarming with lice, prey to the deadly typhus. There remainedonly a couple of thousand homeless wretches out of the 3300 Hungarian inhabitants of Csurog.They can no longer be united.ZSABLYAIt cannot be regarded as a mistake that the Serbian list of casualties issued in 1946, knew about72 fewer Serbian martyrs than what the Hungarian Generals and Colonels responsible for thebloodshed were accused of by the Hungarian Chief of the General Staff. (The reason for the